People are distracted by objects of desire,
and afterward repent of the lust they've indulged,
because they have indulged with a phantom
and are left even farther from Reality than before.

Your desire for the illusory could be a wing,
by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality.
When you have indulged a lust, your wings drop off;
You become lame, abandoned by a fantasy.

Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust,
so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise.
People fancy they are enjoying themselves,
but they are really tearing out their wings
for the sake of an illusion.

As we move into our twenty first western
century we are on the threshold of unlocking
many of the fundamental secrets of life as we
know it. A species poised, as always we have
been, on the edge of the void – the void of our
own unknowing.

We have forever existed in our own
constructed sense of the real. Struggling to
codify, to make sense of our surroundings, we
have relied on our understanding of the world
in order to comprehend our place within it. This
driving combination of our biological
fascination with change, and cultural obsession
with technology, has seen the ability to
augment our physical being evolve to the point
at which we now find ourselves able to
replicate biological systems through genetic
manipulative technologies. We have developed
unprecedented powers to interfere with the
fabric of life itself and control natural systems
but what of ourselves individually. In what
ways can the continuing developments in
science and technology assist us in our
development as human beings.

As a species we are hard-wired to detect the most
subtle changes in the sensory datastream that
informs our existence. We develop filters of
perception to ignore much of this input – or at
least to not respond to it – and yet it does not
diminish the cumulative (subliminal) effect that
these stimuli physically, and psychologically, have
upon our being/consciousness. Our open eyes
respond to movement but when we shut them,
what then do we see of the flux that is our mind?
Within all of us exists the potential "untarnished
mirror" – a state of mind existing beyond the
emotional noise of conscious thought, a quietude
where emotions are not attached to the unending
stream of thoughts that pass through our neural
gates, the membranes of our sensory organs, the
skin of our being. Our western history is one of
discovery, focused on what is "out there" beyond,
rather than within ourselves, of shaping reality to
fit with in our existing scheme – our own
consciousness.

As anthropologist Lyall Watson describes, we are
a species obsessed with the "new". Just as the
invention of perspective in the fifteenth century
allowed artists the unprecedented ability to
induce sensations of immersion for viewers –
through the illusion of depth beyond the painted
membrane of the canvas or panel – we are
witnessing the development of entirely new ways
of constructing, presenting and experiencing
alternative realities – Virtual Realities. With the
explosion of interdisciplinary collaboration where
art, science and technology converge, artists are
more than ever poised to profoundly transform
our lives in unprecedented ways providing
potential for our collective consciousness to
evolve and reinvent itself anew.

Immersion offers a glimpse of the range of
possibilities for new modes of communicating, for
momentarily controlling input and presenting
without distraction the timeless ideas that these
artists strive to share.

The technology used in immersive environments
merely sets the stage for digital mediation in
tangible space. At times the technology is itself on
display as with the prosthetic and robotic devices
of Stelarc that augment his own physical being
during live performances. When dormant these
objects are displayed for their own palpable
cyber/techno-aesthetic qualities. It also can be
much less visible as in Char Davies'
groundbreaking works Osmose and Ephémère.
These interactive fully immersive virtual
environments are mediated by technology
(computers, head mounted display unit,
projection equipment) but rather than celebrate
the technology itself, it only serves to facilitate
the embodied experience of the participants. As
the artist comments:

Rather than deny our embodied
mortality and our material
embeddedness in nature, I seek,
somewhat paradoxically through a
highly technologicalised art form, to
return people to their bodies and to the
earth by using VR to refresh their own
perceptions of an embodied being-in-theworld,
to return them to a perceptual
wonder at being there.[2]

Ken Rinaldo is fascinated by the exploration of
evolving technological systems that move toward
intelligence and autonomy and looks to the
intersection of living and technological systems in
his immersive artificial life robotic installation
Autopoiesis. Victoria Vesna in collaboration with
leading nano-scientist Jim Gimzewski premieres a
work ZERO@WAVEFUNCTION nano dreams and
nightmares focusing on the implications of
nanotechnology a little understood emerging
technology that has unprecedented potential for
social, technological and environmental change.
Richie Kuhaupt and Geoffrey Drake-Brockman
provide opportunity to interact with the virtual in
counterpoint to the more familiar sculptural
presence of an actual full body cast in their
collaborative installation Chromeskin. With
innovative use of 3-D scanning technology and
customised rendering software posited alongside
traditional sculptural techniques Chromeskin bridges the virtual and the physical with the
viewer as the protagonist in what the artists
refer to as "reversed immersion". Utilising
powerful digital animation techniques, Donna Cox
creates visualisations of cosmological events that
will never be seen by human eyes. They assist our
own conceptual understanding of what eventually
becomes a widely accepted view of cosmological
reality.

Cultures supply and inform the
spectrum of possibilities for how
consciousness is organised. The
production of artworks employing some
of the feedback-driven, autopoietic
capabilities that we embody offers some
leads to the solution of the problem of a
technologically determined culture. If
this kind of work can become complex
enough, or if enough connectivity can be
developed among these works – say
over the internet – then is it possible
that the system that thus evolved might
in fact be conscious?
And if so, what then? (Stephen Jones) [3]

The artists in Immersion utilise a wide range of
technologies – familiar, new and emerging.
The investigation of the potential for our own
immersion in alternative realities flows through
much of the work. It brings together projects by
artists who are redefining the possibilities
through the development and subsequent
application of technology – convergent disciplines
that that can ultimately inform and inspire us all.